It's taken 52 years, but Moose Clausen knows the razzing has ended, the ribbing has stopped. For once, he'll be able to walk into his favorite barbershop and say what he wants to say in long, luxurious sentences instead of wisecracks slipped edgewise into the cacophony.

How deeply depressing.

"Everyone knows Louie," Clausen said yesterday while seated on a living room sofa during a memorial for Louis "Louie" LaTorre. A barber in Ballard for 57 years, LaTorre, 78, died five days ago of complications from a heart attack, two days after giving a trim to what would be his final customer.

"He's an institution in Ballard," Clausen said. "Everyone liked him."

The institution was born in 1925, a few years after LaTorre's parents, Tony and Antoinette, arrived from Italy, married and settled in Everett. Tony cut hair and then founded a small coal and diesel fuel business.

Louie went into the Marines and served in World War II in Iwo Jima. When he returned home, he attended barbers' school in Pioneer Square.

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"Dad wanted Louie to be a barber," said Louie's sister, Florence Graham. "He said it was a good business, a clean business."

After barber school, he married his childhood sweetheart, Dolores Uhrich, got his first job in a Vashon Island barbershop and had a son, Joseph. In the 1950s, the family moved from Vashon to Ballard where he worked in and eventually bought a shop on 15th Avenue Northwest.

Enter Clausen, a high school freshman. Louie, customers said, already was known for the best rake crew cut in town. Clausen would learn soon after about Louie's other skill. "He could talk," Clausen said laughing. "He could entertain anyone."

Thus began decades of snipping and yapping. In the early 1970s, he built a new shop on near the corner of Northwest 83rd Street and Mary Avenue. He brought in his 18-year-old daughter, first as an employee and later as a partner. And while Carolyn LaTorre had her mother's gunmetal blue eyes, she got her father's mouth.

"For the first 10 years, we trashed each other constantly," she said while greeting dozens of visitors streaming into her home to pay respects. "I think people came in just for the show. "

She worked and jawed with her dad for 32 years. Twenty years ago, Dolores (who went by Dee) passed away. Oddly, the arguing died then too. Without someone to tell the business partners to cut it out, they finally did.

"We just got tired of it," Carolyn said with a laugh. Louie remarried Priscilla Jellen and the pair remained married for 18 years until his death.

Carolyn doesn't know how many hundreds of Husky and Ballard High School football players drifted through the door and into the tidy wood paneled shop. She can't say how many regular customers they had because for 57 years, Louie's Barber Shop didn't take appointments -- it didn't need to.

By some estimates a good portion of Ballard males dropped by at one point or another.

Louie liked to drive fast. He liked the Mariners -- although years ago, he did express disappointment when he learned that (former manager Lou) Piniella wasn't an Italian name. He liked his homemade wine, and the deep red varietals he politically incorrectly called "dago red."

He didn't like church much and when one attendee suggested in mock seriousness that he expected a religious memorial, Carolyn replied in her sweetest voice, "I think Louie might have said, 'Hmmm, (screw) you.' "

The room, filled with shop regulars, burst out laughing. Louie's gone, but everyone heard his voice in hers.